I think I found a tomato that makes me rethink my "no hybrids" rule...

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Ever since the AeroGarden rekindled my love for gardening, and more specifically, my love for a fresh, vine-ripened tomato (once you taste a properly ripened home-grown tomato, there’s no going back to the flavourless mushmatoes they sell at supermarkets), I’ve been on a self-imposed “No Hybrids” rule, mainly due to the fact that heirlooms taste better, AND you can save the seeds and basically grow “free” tomatoes “forever”, as long as you save the seeds from generation to generation

Hybrids are more problematic as they don’t breed true, sure you can save and replant hybrid seeds, but you never know what you’re gonna’ get, OTOH, hybrids are generally more disease resistant and more vigorous, still that “not breeding true” thing is a tad annoying

This evening, I went down to the local farm stand (Golden Harvest in Kittery Maine), to get some veggies for a salad, local cukes, yellow and orange baby carrots, a couple Brandywine heirloom tomatoes, and a Cherokee Purple

While I was there, I was talking to the guy stocking some fresh tomatoes, heirlooms grown locally at a small coastal New Hampshire farm, he asked if I like cherry tomatoes, of course, I replied, he told me to try one of their orange cherry tomatoes, I grabbed one, popped it in my mouth…

Oh…My…Og!, I had never tasted a tastier tomato than this little orange gem, it had a citrussy bite, it’s sweetness was off the charts, and it finished with a smooth tomatoey finish, it literally tasted like a piece of candy, it had the highest sugar content of any tomato I have yet tried

On a scale of 1-10, this tomato would rate a 25, yes, it’s that good!

I got home, and did some research online, it looks like the tomato in question is the Sunsugar hybrid cherry tomato, it sure didn’t taste like a hybrid

Now I’m actually torn, I’m not a fan of hybrids, mainly due to the inability to save seeds, but the SunSugars are just so delicious, I could eat them like candy (healthy candy at that… :wink: ) I’m tempted to order a packet of seeds and try them in the AG

Therein lies another problem, from the research I’ve done, the Sunsugar can be planted in containers and other small enclosures, but they really do prefer to run wild and unrestrained, and this particular variety can grow to five to SEVEN feet tall, and is apparently incredibly prolific, it’s a given that if I grow it in an AG, I’ll have to grow it in my 6E+, and I’ll have to keep it seriously pruned back, or it may try to take over not only the AG, but probably the entire house to boot, it looks to be the Audrey II of tomato plants (minus the singing-and-eating-people-thing, so maybe it isn’t like an Audrey II, nevermind, stupid analogy :wink: ) or even the Kudzu of tomato plants…

Hmm, do I make an exception to my “no hybrids” rule just this once?

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Well sure. There are tasty hybrids (Celebrity and Cavalier are two I’ve found to be quite good) if you seek out ones that are bred for flavor, not appearance/ability to hold well during shipping/tough skin or whatever the supermarket kinds typically are intended for. Even the supermarket taste quality is up in recent years, especially if you go for cherry and cluster types.

In my opinion though, the variety is only one variable - growing conditions affect flavor considerably in my experience. I’m about 95% sure I tried Sun Sugar once and it wasn’t so great.

Best in my garden so far this year - Aunt Ruby’s German Green - good tomato taste and nicely tangy/acid.

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How do you know the cherry tomato was a hybrid? Or more correctly a derived strain. The two things that developers do are to make produce bigger and more ‘concentrated’. So it is very likely that tomatoes have been bred bigger over the centuries, and quite possible that the Aztecs, Mixtecs and Toltecs were planting from the biggest long before that.

Then, tomatoes are known in Italian as Pomi d’Oro ‘Fruit of Gold’ (Pomo usually means ‘Apple’ but the older Latin sense was ‘Fruit’ in general. That suggests the yellow sunrise variety, which is gold when riper than we care for them in salad today - but my grandmother grew up 100 years ago eating tomatoes as a dessert with sugar. So maybe they were eaten ripe or even verging on rotten like Medlars (an ancient brown sort-of crab-apple).

I have my suspicions that the Golden Apples of the Hesperides that conferred immortality were tomatoes and a few ancients had crossed the Atlantic to bring news, or them back - not so difficult from a Phoenician port in Ghana about where Columbus turned right, because the winds and currents go that way: it is getting back that is difficult, especially for sub-tropical people who might have to do it on the Gulf Stream via Iceland and Norway. If they brought them back, it’s a minor miracle that they did not grow them since the buggers pop up everywhere.

I’m amused about your back to basics with cucumbers though. Is this long thin smooth green cucumbers with hardly any seeds or short fat warty slightly bitter watery ones full of seeds nearly as tough as in courgette/zucchini tending to become yellow fast? Because those are the original and ‘Telegraph’ (the commonest commercial ‘modern’ green variety) derived from them. I admit that I can’t find any Web reference, but I have eaten them!

There is very little that we eat today that hasn’t been extensively crossed and bred in the last 200 years and almost nothing that wasn’t more slowly before that. A few citrus like Kumquats, Mandarins and Satsumas might be ‘natural’, but we owe most of our oranges and lemons and limes to Arab breeders from the ancient Citron. Do you only use Cos (Romaine) lettuce? Because that is the closest to the ancestral dandelion relative (OK, I much prefer it and regard Iceberg as an offence). All the varieties of cabbage and cauliflower and broccoli and sprouting (you don’t see that much any more) and ‘Brussels’ sprouts and an earlier forgotten ‘Collards’ that was similar but open instead of ‘buds’ are all developments unknown in Roman times.

For many years English people cooked an intensely bitter dark green dandelion relative they called Succory. Then a Belgian threw some roots into his cellar for the next year and they sprouted closed all-rib leaves lacking the intense bitterness. Salad Chicory Chicons were born. But just for confusion, what English calls Chicory and Endive, French reverses though they are much the same thing.

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I know that plant hybridization has been going on for ages, maybe I wasn’t clear, my No Hybrids rule is for tomatoes only, and in all honesty it was based on ignorance, I never really got into gardening until last year when I got the Aerogardens, at the time I thought hybrids were simply plants bred mainly for disease resistance and ease of shipping, and that Heirlooms and Open Polinated plants were the ones bred for flavour and quality, clearly I was wrong

I guess it’s time for me to evaluate garden plants (tomatoes specifically) on their actual merits, not rule them out due to the “hybrid” appelation

the main problem I have with hybrids is the difficulty in saving seeds that grow true to the parent plant, I’m a stingy bugger, and like to save seeds, I’ve already grown two generations of cherry tomatoes from my original Aerogarden cherry tomato kit simply by saving the seeds

what the heck, I’ll save some seeds from these orange cherries, see what grows, it’ll be a surprise :slight_smile:

now, to find a way to fit a 5-7’ tall cherry tomato plant into a 2’ tall Aerogarden, looks like it’s heavy pruning time :wink:

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I’ve always thought that part of the reason hybrids get a bad rap is that the insipid taste from being picked green and ripened with ethylene is confused with the actual taste of the tomato variety.

People tend to LOVE the Celebrities, Super Marzanos and SolarFire hybrids I grow. They also love the Porters and other open pollinated varieties too- I think it’s a matter of vine-ripening as opposed to the variety itself.

(that’s not to say that there aren’t differences in taste, but I think they tend to be dwarfed by the handling of commercial vs. home grown tomatoes)

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For the past few years the best-tasting tomatoes I’ve found in my local high-end produce markets are not heirlooms but dry-farmed Early Girls. This variety is a hybrid developed by Burpee many years ago. Dry farming involves minimal irrigation, which has the same effect on tomatoes that it does on wine grapes (smaller fruit with more concentrated flavor). I suppose they grow Early Girls because they stand up well to this treatment.

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Just ordered a packet of seeds for the sunsugar … they look fantastic=)

My ‘aerogarden brand heirloom tomatoes’ are now about 2 inches tall … for some odd reason the mint died :eek: so I had a spot open, so I started one of the tomato plugs while I make space for the new aerogarden with trellis.

My basil on the other hand is growing like you would not believe. About once a week I have to lop off the top 4 inches or so and make pasta sauce :smiley:

Though my chive is worrysome … it may be dying :frowning:

[I have 5 aerogardens, just 1 is set up for lack of space, we are remodeling the kitchen and it will have space for all of my gardens but for now I am keeping one in the bedroom, and this weekend will be adding a second one to the bedroom =) ]

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Mint can die?

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This truly is the end of days.

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I have no idea how it died … I though mint and philodendrons would outlast cockroaches … but the poor things made about an inch of sproutage, then turned black and died :eek:

My thyme is crawling onto my dresser, being pursued by the oregano … my poor chive is cowering in a corner and the basil seems to want to take over the world. If I didnt prune it to make pasta sauce, I would be in fear for my life :smiley:

I never knew that oregano was sort of floppy like thyme, I always thought it was more like the basil …

I love my aerogarden! I even got the master gardener thingy so I can start seedlings next spring =)

I got the lady bug one for my mom for her birthday in Feb … and she adores it, right now it has the english flower garden plugs =)

Though I oopsed and ordered the wrong lettuices, it is the short ones, not the longer plugs like my aerogardens … Ill freecycle them and order the correct ones in a few weeks …